[R] Sparseby Problems

[Ben Stewart]

I've got a problem with the sparseby command (reshape library), and I have
reached the peak of my R knowledge (it isn't really that high).

I have a small data frame of 23 rows and 15 columns, here is a subset, the
first four columns are factors and the rest are numeric (only one, line54 is
provided).

   bearID YEAR Season SEX      line54
5    1900    8      3   0  16.3923519
11   2270    5      1   0 233.7414014
12   2271    5      1   0 290.8207652
13   2271    5      2   0 244.7820844
15   2291    5      1   0   0.0000000
16   2291    5      2   0  14.5037795
17   2291    6      1   0   0.0000000
18   2293    5      2   0 144.7440752
19   2293    5      3   0   0.0000000
20   2293    6      1   0  16.0592270
21   2293    6      2   0  30.1383426
28   2298    5      1   0   0.9741067
29   2298    5      2   0   9.6641018
30   2298    6      2   0   8.6533828
31   2309    5      2   0  85.9781303
32   2325    6      1   0 110.8892153
35   2331    6      1   0  26.7335562
44   2390    7      2   0   7.1690620
45   2390    8      2   0  44.1109897
46   2390    8      3   0 503.9074898
47   2390    9      2   0   8.4393660
54   2416    7      3   0  48.6910907
58   2418    8      2   0   5.7951139

Sparseby works fine when I try to calculate mean

>sparseby(mF[1:5], mF$Season, mean)

  mF$Season bearID YEAR Season SEX    line54
1         1     NA   NA     NA   0  84.90228
2         2     NA   NA     NA   0  54.90713
3         3     NA   NA     NA   0 142.24773

But it goes nuts when looking for max or min

> sparseby(mF[5:6], mF$Season, max)
  mF$Season structure(c(2169.49621795108, 1885.22677689026, 2492.17544685464
1         1                                                         2169.496
2         2                                                         1885.227
3         3                                                         2492.175

Any ideas? All I want is to calculate create three data.frames, mean, min
and max.

Thanks,

Ben Stewart